Steven T. Varela is currently an Associate Director with the Center for Faculty Leadership and Development (CFLD), and faculty member with the Department of English and Entering Student Experience at The University of Texas at El Paso. In his role with CFLD, Varela specializes in curriculum and instructional design for fully online, blended and tech-enhanced courses, and teaching with technology, and is an expert using multimedia and multimodal approaches to teaching and learning. He oversees the Creative Studios unit, which is responsible for graphic design, software and web programming, multimedia, emerging technologies and professional development. As a faculty member, Varela’s research and teaching interests include the areas of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), Gamification and Game-Informed Learning, Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice, Popular Culture, Graphic Novels and Literacy, and Transformational Leadership, Organization, and Educational Policy, with content expertise in Literature, Literary Theory, Rhetoric and Composition, and Reading Education. Varela is an inaugural recipient of the UT Regents Award for Outstanding Teaching and is a UTEP Distinguished Teaching Professor.